#56: How to Create Content to Attract Your Target Market

There are two kinds of content in this world: content that attracts and content that sells.

It’s easy to spend all your time and effort focusing on the second part. Eyes on the prize, right? And believe me, I want you focused on that end result.

But it’s crucial to remember that the end result needs a strong beginning. In other words, you’ll never get to that sale if you haven’t attracted the people who want to buy your product!

Today is all about the first half of the sales equation.

The more you craft content geared toward your ideal customer, the more sales you’ll make. And these won’t just be one-time sales. You’ll be talking to people who want to buy from you over and over, because they feel connected to you and your product. When you create content that makes them feel understood, that communicates an empathy for their situation and an excitement about helping them with your product, they are going to be watching their inboxes for your emails and jumping up and down each time you launch something new.

These are the people you want to find, right?

So let’s talk about how you can reach them.

First, the Good News…

When you know your target market really well, creating content for them becomes incredibly easy. We talked last week about creating a survey that helps you get inside the heads of your target market. Once you’re there, you’ll be able to instantly rattle off ten things they need…

Which then become the topics of each piece of content you create.

Let me jump ahead really quick to tell you that our free giveaway for this week is a list of inspiration boosters for creating magnetic, empathetic content that your audience can’t resist. Click here to get it now.

What Counts as Content?

Ready for some more good news? Everything you do online is content.

A Facebook post counts as a content piece, whether it’s video or words or simply an image. So does a tweet. An email (whether to your whole list or just a segment of it), the text and imagery on your landing page, a free giveaway, a podcast, a thirty-minute webinar…

You get the idea.

We all have our favorite places to post content. Maybe you’re Twitter-happy and can post 140-character quips all day long. Or maybe you love doing quick video updates from wherever you happen to find yourself.

So don’t worry if you’re not the world’s most prolific blogger. If you’re making your voice heard online, you’re creating and posting content, and you are ahead of the game.

Consistency Is Key

This is one thing I have learned from all of my mentors: the people that are most consistent in terms of posting content beat out the competition in reaching any given market.

This is because consistency is one of the primary ways you earn the trust and respect of your target market. They come to rely on hearing from you every two days, or every other Thursday, or whenever it is that your regular updates take place. It’s less important how often it is, and more important that it happens on a regular basis. I’ll say it again: Consistency is Key.

Believe me, I know how hard this can be. It seems like every time I get on a roll with posting content regularly, a product launch derails my schedule and all of a sudden I’m scrambling to come up with new content.

For me, the key to being consistent is batching. For instance, with this podcast, I come up with lots of topics in advance, and get started right away with creating and scheduling episodes, coming up with images, queuing the social media updates…the whole nine yards. This way, I don’t find myself scrambling (as often!) on Wednesday afternoon for something to post the next morning.

Simplify by Diversifying

Okay, so say you have a lot of fun within creating short Facebook videos, but your brain dries up the second you sit down to write a blog. Does that mean you should abandon writing and just rely on Facebook videos to communicate with your audience?

Definitely not. First of all, you’re going to miss a huge segment of your potential customers by relying on only one form of content. Second, there are just things that a blog can communicate that videos can’t…and vice versa! You don’t have to do all kinds of content in equal measure, but if you want to reach as many people as possible, you’re going to want to use as many different kinds of content to catch their attention in all the places they might be hanging out.

Fortunately, every idea you come up with for one kind of content can be easily translated into a totally different piece of content. Your videos can be turned into a blog post. Your blog post can be turned into a slide deck. Your slide deck can be turned into a series of Twitter images.

In other words, creating different content pieces just got a lot simpler.

Open the Conversation

Obviously, even with all these ways to repurpose your existing content, you’re going to have to create new original pieces sometimes…you know, so that you can repurpose them later!

This is where you really tap into the insights about your ideal customer that you learn through sending the kind of survey we talked about last week. These insights help you spark a conversation that surprises your customer with how well you understand them, how “heard” they feel.

Here are some prompts to initiate the conversation with your audience:

Identify the #1 question you get asked all the time…and answer it.

What should your ideal customer be asking you that they are not asking yet?

What are your top three posts on Facebook in the last six months?

Which experts does your ideal customer find valuable, or who do they really value the opinion of?

What could your ideal customer talk about all day long?

What is your ideal customer most afraid of?

What does your ideal customer need to know about you?

What is your ideal customer posting on Pinterest/watching on YouTube?

What is your ideal customer’s “want” and what’s the Trojan horse you use to deliver it to them?

What could help your ideal customer right now?

Get more of Amy’s insights on creating content, including an interview with social media maven Donna Mortiz. Listen to Episode 56 in full.

Our free giveaway this week has even more of these inspiration boosters for helping you create content. It also has a list of 20 specific ways you can repurpose your existing content in fresh new pieces. Click here to get it right now.

About Amy

Amy is a social media strategist and co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies. She helps entrepreneurs across industries establish strategies to maximize the power of social media and increase the success of their online marketing efforts.